1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for navigating categorized information using a graphical user interface.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of the issues in modern search engine development is allowing the user to navigate pre-categorized information, which is arranged by theme, or subject matter. For example, on Yahoo, www.yahoo.com, it is possible to view a tree-like taxonomy of information that has been indexed by Yahoo. The structure of this taxonomy is tree-like, moving from the broadest level, to more detailed, and so forth. To navigate the tree, the user clicks on links (which represent branches and sub-branches of the tree), which the user views as most relevant to his particular interests, and therefore likely to lead to the document that he is searching for. Examples of this tree structure are illustrated in the screen shots in FIGS. 25-27, in this case, with the subject matter centered around “kids/children.”
One of the difficulties for most users with such tree-like structures is the fact that the human mind does not normally operate in this fashion—for most people, information is not structured into a tree, but has many connections between branches of the tree, sub-branches of the tree, connections between sub-branches of different branches, and so forth—in other words, information, as perceived by the human mind, has many more connections and inter-relationships than would be obvious from simply organizing it into a tree-like taxonomy.
Another difficulty with the tree-like organization of information is the fact that moving “horizontally,” or moving “at an angle” (conceptually), where the user moves from one sub-branch on one level to a different sub-branch, and possibly to a different level, of the tree, is usually not permitted. The user, having “gone down” into a particular branch, sub-branch, sub-sub-branch, etc., and having discovered that the information there is not what he is seeking, needs to go back “up” the tree, and repeat the process again for a different branch, sub-branch, etc. This is a fairly cumbersome method of navigating organized information, and is one reason why many users are in fact unaware that a search engine, such as Yahoo, provide for this form of searching for information—while such an organization makes it easy for structuring searches in a computer, it is counter intuitive to most people, and therefore, frequently useless.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art to enable users to navigate information organized by subject matter or theme, in an intuitive and easy to understand manner.